Thursday, October 31, 2013

Diagrams for hierarchical models: New drawing tools

Two new drawing tools for making hierarchical diagrams have been recently developed. One tool is a set of distribution and connector templates in LibreOffice Draw and R, created by Rasmus Bååth. Another tool is scripts for making the drawings in LaTeX via TikZ, created by Tinu Schneider. Here is an example of a diagram made by Tinu Schneider, using TikZ/LaTeX with Rasmus Bååth's distribution icons:

The drawing language TikZ is very powerful and can create very elaborate illustrations. Here is a variation in which the distribution nodes have boxes around them:

The distribution icons above are images created in R with a program by Rasmus Bååth. The program generates a catalog of icons with the same visual formatting. The icons can then be used in TikZ/LaTeX as shown in Tinu Schneider's drawings above ...

... or they can be used with freehand drawing in LibreOffice Draw. Rasmus has created a screencast that shows how do use the icons in LibreOffice Draw:

If you use LaTeX and you want precise positioning of nodes, ability to show wavy arrows and double-line arrows, and math fonts in the diagram that exactly match the math fonts in the text, then the TikZ/LaTeX tools are for you. If you want WYSIWYG editing, then LibreOffice is for you.

LINKS to the details:

Rasmus Bååth's blog post about his system is here. In particular, the LibreOffice template is here, and the R code for generating the distributions is at his Github folder. You can download LibreOffice here. (You might recall that Rasmus also created the in-browser app for "Bayesian estimation supersedes the t test" (BEST) available here.)